Victoria Fu Kicks Off MFA Potluck Season

As all tight-knit communities do, CCAD’s MFA program has created a handful of traditions over the years. One of them is hosting potlucks in our studio space in conjunction with talks by visiting artists. This year’s first potluck did not disappoint (they never do). We were privileged to present California-based video artist, Victoria Fu.

A few facts about Victoria:

She has had recent solo shows at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, The Contemporary in Baltimore, the Simon Preston Gallery in New York, and the University Art Gallery at UC Irvine, CA.

She participated in the IX Nicaragua Biennial in Managua, Nicaragua

She was a featured artist in the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art

She is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow

So you can imagine our level of excitement leading up to meeting her.

Before giving her talk, Victoria was gracious enough to conduct studio visits with a handful of graduate students. Her studio practice, history in a wide variety of mediums, and notable experience as a teacher make her a force of knowledge that is difficult to match.

Another source of Fu’s knowledge surely comes from her intrinsic ability to ask questions. She began her presentation by saying, in regards to her recent work, “I am approaching all this with much curiosity.”

Her current curiosity primarily lies in various forms of spectatorship, particularly in relation to touch screens and online presence. The “literal probing” we do with our fingers in order to interact with devices and each other has given her reason to often use the human hand as the protagonist in her work.

But the hand is not the only active element at play – bodies dance, a man’s smiling eyes are seen, a little girl smiles and waves. On paper, these sound like scenes from a home movie. But Victoria’s choice to utilize found stock footage turns moments that could be easily portrayed as personal into the generically and often times humorously canned, as is most of the Internet. Victoria explained, “A face destroys emptiness – unless it’s stock.”

As part of her presentation, viewers were treated to a viewing of her piece shown in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, entitled Belle Captive I (see stills here).

In the end, her talk circled back to the idea of questioning. She humbly claimed she had no answers. But although Fu maintained the fact she merely asks questions, she definitively stated, “Art is awareness. It is a gesture towards an act of self-awareness.”

It’s easy to see that this awareness can only come from asking questions.